Ask the Core Team

Many new computers are shipping with the option to boot Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) instead of standard BIOS. In today’s blog I walkthrough how I installed Windows 7 SP1 X64 Enterprise on a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop that supports...

A commonly asked question among people looking at a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 installation is “why is the WinSxS folder so big?!” To answer that question I need to first describe componentization, and how components...

Perhaps the largest call generator for the Core Team is for us to determine cause of a hard system crash that generates a Blue Screen and memory dump file. Commonly called a "Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)." The vast majority of these memory dumps...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Sr. Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core team at Microsoft. If you ever find yourself analyzing storage performance with Performance Monitor, this post is for you. We will go beyond very brief descriptions...

Hi, Today’s blog will walk you through installing the Volume Activation services role on Windows Server 2012 so you can setup a new Windows Server 2012 KMS host. Initial Configuration of a new Windows Server 2012 KMS host 1. After installing Windows Server...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core Team. One subject we haven’t written much about in the Core team blog is “disk performance”. Today I would like to talk a little bit about measuring Physical...

With each new release of Windows, it's a challenge to balance keeping the OS footprint small with maintaining forward compatibility for applications and devices. The .Net Framework is at the heart of this challenge. In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to...

Hi, my name is Scott McArthur and I am Senior Support Escalation Engineer on the Deployment/Devices team. In today’s blog I am going to go over the steps to deploy Windows 8.1 Enterprise X64 Update to a Surface Pro 3. In this example I will be using...

Hello, my name is Scott McArthur. I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover a common question we get involving product keys. Many times you may have a product key but you need to find out what type of key...

This is Vimal Shekar and Krishnan Ayyer from the Windows Support team. Today in this blog, we will be discussing about an issue that we are seeing increasingly being reported in support. We will look at the effects of removing .Net Framework from a Windows...

In this blog, I will discuss the overall general practices to be considered when configuring networks in Failover Clusters.
Avoid single points of failure:
Identifying single points of failure and configuring redundancy at every point in the network...

In today’s blog I am going to discuss how to handle booting from a USB drive on a UEFI system so you can deploy Windows. It is common to create bootable USB flash drives or hard drives so you can boot from them to do various tasks such as Boot...

The Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering feature provides high availability for services and applications. To ensure applications and services remain highly available, it is imperative the cluster service running on each node in the cluster function...

Things to consider before the upgrade
Hi Again everybody,
Windows Server 2012 was launched in August this year. With an innovative user interface, powerful remote management tools, a big bunch of new features, major enhancements to existing ones...

Hello, my name is Emmers Presson. I am a Support Escalation Engineer for Microsoft in the Windows Core team. The purpose of this blog is to give you the steps to install a hotfix (or any other “package”) on the currently running operating system using...

“Why can’t I have a drive bigger than 2 TB?” This is a common question. And as storage has gotten bigger and cheaper, I see it more and more. So let’s take a few minutes to talk about the mysterious 2 TB limit. There are actually three different...

Running sysprep
Today's blog will cover a common question we get with deploying Windows. The question usually starts as "How many times can I run sysprep"? While the answer is simple it requires a more detailed explanation.
When sysprep executes...

Welcome to the AskCore blog. Today, we are going to talk about nodes being removed from active Failover Cluster membership randomly. If you are having problems with a node being removed from membership, you are seeing events like this logged in your System...

Hello everyone, I am Palash Acharyya, Support Escalation Engineer with the Microsoft Platforms Core team. In the past decade, we have come a long way from Windows Server 2003 to all the way to Windows Server 2012R2. There has been a sea-change in the...

Hello, my name is Kevin Ledman. I am a Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover how to run the new Sysprep and Capture Task Sequence included with MDT 2010. If you choose to deploy an operating system manually or need...

Both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 include the System File Checker (SFC) tool. Previous operating systems included this tool also. This discussion is specific to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. If you would like more information on previous...

Hello. My name is Bill Spears and I am a Premier Field Engineer in the Windows/Platforms group at Microsoft. In today’s blog I will discuss the approach that I use to manage Out-Of-Box drivers within the deployment process of MDT (Microsoft...

One question I get asked a lot working with our customers is how to failover the ‘Cluster Group’ and ‘Available Storage’ groups? Under the covers, those two groups are still just groups like any other you’d see under ‘Services and Applications’ in Failover...